Truman's Spy: A Cold War Spy Thriller Page 4

  “One man’s as good as another,” Buchanan said. “There were some fine Negro units fighting for our flag during the war.”

  “So you’re one of them who thinks like that, huh?” Rafferty said.

  “You could say that.”

  “Just don’t bring none of them in here and we won’t have no trouble.”

  Rafferty was the grandson of a Confederate soldier - or so he liked to claim - but he had had a knee shattered in the First World War. He had hobbled around with a pair of canes for most of his adult life, but in the last few years arthritis had afflicted him. So he had sold his store and now sat home on a veteran's pension, plus social security, plus rent from the third floor, which his wife collected.

  "It ain't the money, Mr. Buchanan," Mrs. Rafferty had said the day she first showed the apartment to him. Mrs. Rafferty spoke with the lilting inflections of the Mississippi Delta, which she admitted that she hadn't seen in years.

  "It's these old legs of mine," she continued. "Ain't much better than my husband's these days. Don't have much use for a third floor, so we don't mind having company. 'Specially a nice young man."

  "Yes, ma'am," he had answered.

  She had looked carefully at him. "If you bring ladies back here," she said knowingly, "make sure they're nice ladies. And don't make too much noise. I don't mind none, but Elvin don't sleep so good. The monthly rent is fifty-five dollars."

  Buchanan, seeing the fray on the carpets in the entrance hall, was sure to pay it on the first day of every month.

  Tonight, Buchanan walked through the front door and up the two flights of stairs. He could smell the pot roast Mrs. Rafferty made every Thursday. He arrived at his own apartment, put his key in the door, and turned the lock. He felt the morning's mail brush against the floor as he opened the door. He threw on a light and soon found his way into the bathroom. There he hung his wet coat in the shower.

  Philadelphia. Monday.

  He poured himself a Scotch and settled into an overstuffed club chair in his living room. He was tired. He could use a few days off and knew he wasn’t going to get one. He had planned to go out for dinner or make some soup in his kitchen.

  Instead, he fell asleep in the chair.

  CHAPTER 6

  In the frigid hours after midnight, someone set a man on fire near Barrier Point, a lonely section of warehouses and oil refineries near the United States Navy Yard in South Philadelphia. The man had been murdered with a single bullet fired into the crown of the head, a shot that had taken a course straight downward inside his body and stopped in his stomach. Then he had been saturated with gasoline and turned into a human torch. It was the final week and a half of the year 1949. It was an ugly way to celebrate.

  A young chief petty officer named Dennis O'Brien was on guard duty at the navy yard. It was less than ten degrees Fahrenheit. The wind gusting up the dark Delaware River from the Atlantic Ocean made the air feel even colder. So O'Brien had permission to remain in his sentry booth for much of his shift and walk his four-hundred-yard section of the navy yard's perimeter only twice an hour. This he did for the final time at two forty-three. That's when O'Brien saw the flames.

  A few minutes later an alarm rang at the fire company at 6th Street and Oregon Avenue. The fire fighters responded with a single engine and hosed down what they thought to be a trash fire. Only when the blaze subsided did the firemen realize that this particular call would have to be passed along to the Philadelphia Police Department as well. By this time the victim was unrecognizable. Only parts of his shoes, a tiny piece of clothing here and there, his bridgework, his eyeglasses, some jewelry, and a small piece of skin under his left arm had escaped the flames.

  The homicide division of the Philadelphia Police Department, Fourth District, was notified at twenty-two minutes after AM Two officers of that unit, Sergeant Fred Castelli and Detective Mike Foley, arrived at ten minutes before five.

  They came in the same car, parked near the fire engine, and walked toward the wet, steaming remains. The dead man's charred limbs were contorted at impossible angles, from which rose a mixture of steam and smoke. There was a repulsive odor in the air, somewhere in between burning rubber and seared pork. Neither cop was moved. What hurt was the icy wind off the Delaware River.

  Castelli grumbled. "What a night for a barbecue." Behind him he heard two of the firemen laugh.

  Castelli was a good homicide cop when he cared to be, which was less and less as the years marched by. He was forty-one years old, single, five feet nine, 205 pounds before a good Italian meal, and 210 afterward. He drove a '46 DeSoto and had what his cop friends called “a duck-ass hairdo.” An aura of small-time violence clung to him. He always looked like he was on his way to a murder scene.

  In comparison, Mike Foley, Castelli's partner, was a quiet, thin, spare family man of thirty-six. He had been a cop for eight years and a homicide detective for five. He had light, thinning hair and impassive blue eyes behind thick, silver-framed glasses. He looked like a high school math teacher. With Castelli, Foley completed an unlikely couple.

  There was nothing unlikely about the abilities of Castelli and Foley as murder detectives, however. At the end of each fiscal year they usually had several dozen “quality” arrests between them.

  Castelli stared down at what remained of the corpse, his breath making small cones in front of him. He touched the dead man's left arm with the toe of his shoe.

  "Know the worst thing about this?" he asked. "The gentleman's wallet may have burned up with him. Perfectly good money up in smoke."

  Foley broke out a pack of Pall Malls. They smoked. Castelli turned toward the sound of an arriving car. "Here's the ME," he said to his partner. "Finally."

  The doctor from the medical examiner's office was named Harry Wolf. Wolf was a man in his thirties who was on the staff of one of the city hospitals that specialized in D.O.A.s. Wolf's father-in-law was a ward boss in Kensington, which was how Harry picked up an extra check each week pronouncing crime and accident victims dead at the scene. Wolf specialized in tough calls such as this one, where he could take one glance and proceed straight to the paperwork.

  "Don't forget to check his pulse, doc," said Castelli.

  "What do you think, Wolf?" Foley added. "Natural causes?"

  "How'd you guys like to wait for two hours next time?" Wolf asked, looking up from a pad of death certificates. "Or maybe I'll go get some coffee right now. Were you first officers on the scene? That means you stay until a doctor pronounces this guy dead and signs the form."

  "So? Sign it," said Castelli.

  A contingent of young sailors in pea coats looked on from the other side of the fence. Wolf might not have signed it, but the wagon from the morgue arrived with a body bag and a set of shovels. So did Captain Robert Heintz from the Fourth District police command, along with the department photographer.

  Heintz was a big, strapping man with gray hair and wide shoulders. He had seen things go bump in the night in South Philly since Prohibition. Much of what he had seen had been stranger than this.

  "Just wrap him up and get him out of here," Heintz said. "And you, Wolf. Shut your trap and sign the form."

  Wolf complied. Moments later, technicians loaded the charred human remains onto the body wagon and removed them.

  There it was. An unidentified man had been murdered and his body mutilated beyond recognition. Off he went to the city morgue where his case would diminish daily among the priorities of the homicide division. It was all too typically the sort of case that drifts into the oblivion of the unsolved and forgotten among the big-city police forces of North America. All that was missing, so far at least, was one person who cared enough to take a closer look.

  CHAPTER 7

  In Oregon on December 23, the bank threw a noontime Christmas party for everyone who worked in the town center. Chief O'Connell attended. There was a light snow that day, and everyone made corny remarks about a white Christmas. Most of the shops in town closed towards three
in the afternoon.

  Chief O'Connell's nerves had been less on edge since the cellar window incident. While not convinced that he had imagined what he saw, he had nonetheless confronted his nightmare, and the nightmare had vanished.

  So much the better. He had also agreed to go to Seattle to talk to a police psychologist instead of an actual psychiatrist. Probably Helen had been right all along about this, too, he told himself. She often had answers before he did.

  By four-thirty the day before Christmas, the sky was dark. The light snow continued. Chief O'Connell went to his car to make his final run across the county roads. His deputies would be off this evening. Nothing serious had ever happened on Christmas Eve in Peterton since Oregon became a state in 1859. So by all odds the town would be safe if he went home a half hour early.

  It was on Route 31 just to the southeast of the town that Chief O'Connell saw the brown Plymouth that had apparently skidded. There was a woman looking at the front end of the car where it had left the road. He slowed to a halt and turned on his overhead lights. He stepped out, noticing the California license plates on the car. A single woman driving home for Christmas was O'Connell's first impression. Yet, his suspicious nature always aroused, he observed immediately that the car was pointed north toward Washington, not south toward California.

  "Trouble?" he asked.

  "I'll say," she said. "I skidded. Take a look."

  She was blond and very young, he noticed. Well, if she had skidded, he reasoned, maybe one big push could get the car back on the road. Or maybe he would use a heavy rope and give it a pull with his own car. Then, by happy coincidence, another car appeared behind O'Connell's police cruiser.

  Fine. With the help of another man, O'Connell thought, he would have the girl on her way in no time.

  O'Connell walked to the front of the car. It was off the road, all right, but he couldn't see any damage. The other car pulled to a stop. O'Connell looked at the girl's tire tracks. No skid marks. Odd.

  "What’s the problem?" he asked.

  The fool in the other car parked but maintained his high beams, irritating O'Connell. The other driver stepped out and walked a step or two in their direction.

  "I don't know," the girl said. "Won't go."

  "What won't go?" he asked.

  "Car."

  She spoke strangely. She looked anxious. And her car's motor was running. Then he looked at her more closely and - instinct again - saw something in her eyes, something that scared him just like he had been scared the other night. The other driver stopped walking. The girl quickly stepped back and away from him.

  "You're not even off the road," O'Connell said to her. "Won't your car move?"

  She said nothing.

  "Answer me, will you?" The other headlights blinded him. Where had the other driver gone? The man had moved laterally. In fact, who in hell was…?

  In the fraction of a second before anything happened, O'Connell knew he was as good as dead. The man behind him, the man he couldn't see because of the headlights, was raising a pistol.

  Within that moment O'Connell's mind was perfectly lucid. It was as if he were grasping a small victory in the knowledge that he had been imagining something after all. In a reflex to stay alive, O'Connell leapt to one side and groped for his sidearm. But the man he couldn't see opened fire. Two bullets hit O'Connell squarely in the chest. The force of the shots hurled the police officer backward and to the side. His own weapon flew from his hand.

  As the pain seared through him, he was aware of very little except his own agony. He steadied himself against his police cruiser, clutched his wounds, and stared. He had no idea where the woman had gone. He was only aware of yet another set of headlights coming from somewhere else, accompanied by the rumble of a truck.

  The assassin fired twice again. Two more times O'Connell felt the cylinders of death ripping through his insides. The final shot blew him away from his own vehicle and sent him sprawling violently backward onto the snow.

  He heard voices: a man and a woman. They sounded distant and they did not converse in anything he understood. Their words sounded garbled, and in all rationality, he thought that because he was lying in the snow dying, he could no longer understand the English language.

  His final moments of consciousness had their own insanity. Everything seemed to be getting darker and brighter all at once. Visions of the war flashed. The pain wasn't in any one place anymore, it was all through him. And the wetness around him wasn't rain or melting snow. It was his own blood.

  Something - a woman's body moving or was it an angel's? - crossed quickly in front of those damnable headlights. For an immeasurably short moment O'Connell had a silhouetted vision of the man who had shot him. The figure struck a chord of familiarity in his memory. O'Connell battled with it as he heard the roar of a motor. Then, seconds later, he had placed the man who had shot him. The shoulders and the outline of the head matched with the nightmare that had fled from his cellar window. And the voices were an echo of what he had heard in Europe during the war.

  All that made perfect sense. O'Connell’s nightmare had come alive. As his strength faded, a vision of his wife and children spun wildly before him, and he was unhappy that he couldn't reach out and hold them. Simultaneously, everything closed in on him and the entire world spiraled violently into blackness.

  CHAPTER 8

  Where Special Agent Thomas Buchanan lived in Washington, there was a pleasant little Italian restaurant around the corner on 6th Street. There, a plump but endearing little woman named Cora held court each night. Cora was a widow from the war; pro-Mussolini partisans had murdered her husband, Gianni, in Rome in 1938. She had been more fortunate and had managed to flee to the United States, travelling by steamship from Genoa to New York.

  She had supported herself during the war by cooking for friends, eventually setting up a small trattoria downstairs below street level in a brownstone. Her business grew and now she owned her own place, along with her brother, Ray, a former POW who had joined her after the fighting ended in Europe.

  Together, they worked hard and prospered. Ray kept the beer cold. Cora made good spaghetti with meatballs and wasn't shy about serving man-size portions. This Saturday would not be the first time Thomas Buchanan had eaten dinner there alone as he pondered a professional conundrum. Nonetheless, he also enjoyed dusting off his wartime Italian and chatting with Cora and her brother in their native language.

  It was also Christmas Eve and Cora’s was one of the few places open. Feeling very much alone, Buchanan showed up at six-thirty in the evening for dinner. “Cora’s,” as the place was called, was cheerful and full. There were tables and booths, red tablecloths and a black and white tiled floor. Cora had set up a Christmas tree by the front door.

  Buchanan, feeling alone with himself, took a single table toward the rear.

  “So?” he asked himself again. He pondered again as he sipped a glass of bold Chianti. How could he investigate John Garrett? What would this lead to? After ten years, would he come face-to-face again with Ann Garrett, the infatuation of his prewar youth, the first woman with whom he had ever fallen in love? And so what if the old man was a Red? Left to their own devices, the Marxists and their misguided fellow travelers pretty successfully made fools of themselves without help from anyone else. So what was with this particular burr under J. Edgar’s saddle? What was the real agenda, if there really was one?

  He couldn't take this case. This was ridiculous. Personally degrading, snooping into the family and professional affairs of a one-time, potential father-in-law. As far as Buchanan was concerned, midway through a second glass of wine, it was settled.

  He would not do it. Not a chance. Philadelphia right after Christmas was out of the question. He had made his decision. First thing in the new week, he would tell Hoover what he thought.

  “How are you tonight, Mr. Buchanan?” Cora asked. She had help in the kitchen these days, more family from the old country it appeared, and waited tables her
self.

  “I’m fine. You?” he asked.

  “Aside from some rheumatism, I’m very good,” she said. “Merry Christmas.”

  “Merry Christmas,” he returned.

  “May the new year bring you God’s blessing and good fortune.”

  “Thank you, Cora. The same to you and your family.”

  “Nineteen fifty. Time goes by, doesn’t it?”

  “Too fast,” Buchanan agreed.

  Cora took his order and walked it to the kitchen. Buchanan thought of the Garrett assignment and reminded himself again of one of the simple truths of his profession.

  Cases were not solved by magic and they were rarely solved by luck, though luck was appreciated when it appeared. Rather, the key element in any federal investigation was routine, unspectacular inquiry, done by the special agents in the field. Bureau leadership rarely left the safety of its Washington offices, other than to appear at an arrest to have pictures taken.

  Buchanan had been around the Bureau long enough to have spoken with many of the veterans who had worked on a certain high profile case seventeen years earlier. The case had become part of FBI folklore.

  He recalled it. A millionaire oilman named Charles Urschel had been abducted from his Oklahoma City mansion on the steamy Saturday night of July 23, 1933. Masked gunmen blindfolded him and drove him to a remote ranch in the Southwest. The kidnappers demanded $200,000 in ransom. The money was to be paid in old unmarked twenty-dollar bills or Urschel would be blown into the next dimension.

  For his first week as a prisoner, Urschel heard little more than the sound of pigs outside the building where he was held, a farm sound that did not come as much of a surprise, considering his captors fed him ham at every meal. The only other sounds of note were the distant muffled voices of his captors and, reliably at nine forty-five each morning, the sound of an aircraft overhead. Another flight passed overhead in the opposite direction at five forty-five each afternoon.